Every evening at ten past nine he sends you into the dark world. The host of Krypta FM – pronounced Kryp! Ta! FM! in the staccato voice of any good radio announcer – and you are his eager listener and hopeful guardian. Smell the evening air. Take a deep breath! The small-town world sleeping around you is definitely full of cryptids. Has anyone seen a mothman lately? A werewolf? Grab a camera and go outside – but be careful, okay?
The genius, of course, is that Krypta FM, a short and completely free exploration game, throws you into two worlds at once. There's a small Polish town with abandoned train stations, dark forest roads, and flickering streetlights, and there's the 2006 world in which the game is set. That era gives you clunky digital cameras with questionable batteries, billboards full of flame wars and “netiquette” talk, and PC desktops still in thrall to Frutiger Aero. As such, Krypta FM is several things at once. It's sinister and nostalgic. It's spooky and often oddly sweet.
It’s a great combination for a game, and it all comes down to a simple, deeply evocative idea. Strange things are happening in your village, and you hear about them every night online and on the radio. It’s a quiet, easy-going thing to be part of a club, an informal group that believes there’s more to it than most people are willing to see. So every day in the game you’re given a push toward what you need to investigate. Who’s butchering the cattle? Who’s making smoke in the woods? Someone on the Krypta FM forums is talking about Tarot cards. Someone else is asking you to take a picture of a statue in a graveyard…
These daily, or rather nightly, objectives provide enough of a sense of structure as you begin to explore a surprisingly rugged open world. At the centre of it all is your small house, the radio dial set to Krypta FM, the noble body of your PC monitor flickering between screensavers on the table, and the narrow hallway leading to the front door – so gloomy that you’ll need to turn on your flashlight. But beyond that, and beyond your neglected garden with its missing fence panels and chain-link gates, is the paved road, the rest of the village, and everything else lurking just out of sight.
And these places provide the game with its most evocative moments. Forests so dark that you can't really see, even with a flashlight, as you move through thorny absences of trees and bushes. A train station, now padlocked and inaccessible. There's that graveyard somewhere, but where exactly? And what's with the hissing, creaking lamppost beyond the point where the pavement gives way to muddy mud?
You’ll explore all of these places and get to know them well. That’s because your mission to take photos of local oddities and post them on Krypta FM’s bulletin boards takes you away from home in all directions. It’s all very simple. But you’ll be in this spooky world for much longer than just taking a few photos. You’ll be there until the whole place starts to feel real, and that’s because of the map you use to find your way around. It’s a hand-drawn affair that you hold in front of you and read with a flashlight. There’s no marker that magically appears on the map to show you where you are, or a helpful compass rose to point you in the right direction. You have to figure it all out for yourself, and instead of frustration, it creates a subtle weirdness that provides much of the spookier fun to be had here.
And as you figure it out, you start to realize that this map is defined by its abstractions. A path that looks short and straight on the map might be three times longer in the real world and full of energizing twists and turns. And it might be really, really dark. And you can wander in the right direction for a very long time, each new step making you more certain that you have left the right path behind and are walking into oblivion. Do you keep going? Do you turn back? Can you find your way back from here?
This is prime territory for sudden scares, and at least one of them is thrillingly simple and effective throughout Krypta FM’s short running time. But the game also knows when to hold off on tapping you on the shoulder or leaping in front of you. Some of the moments I remember most are when I was in the woods and was sure something was going to happen, but then it didn’t. Krypta FM’s world feels real, because I definitely spent a lot of time lost in it, but I also spent a lot of time just standing in the trees, wondering if I was truly alone or if something—a monster? the game’s designers’ intention?—was actually out there with me.
So rather than shocks, it’s a game that’s often punctuated by moments of relief. Just when I’m about to lose hope, I’ll come across the thing I was meant to photograph and take a decent photo of it. Lost in the woods, I’ll see the amber glow of a town in the distance, and suddenly I know the way home. Back on the forums, what I thought was a slightly clumsy photo will get a decent response: I’ll feel that strange thrill of being part of an online community and someone else’s world, even if I only see it through the curved screen of an old monitor, the modern equivalent of Madame Leota’s head floating in a crystal ball.
This, I think, is the sweetness that consistently balances everything spooky about this midnight countryside: with the promise of cryptozoology, photography assignments, local cult members, and satanic graffiti, Krypta FM promises community and creates a growing sense of belonging. The names on the forums start to sound familiar, and I start to anticipate the things they might say, the responses they might leave under my posts. The map slowly starts to make sense, and by day three, I’m leaving the house feeling pretty confident about where I need to go. My photo destinations are crossed off my list, and the story of what’s really going on there starts to become clear. I go to bed, entranced by what I’ve seen, and the next day, at ten past nine, I’m ready to turn on the radio again and hear that familiar voice.